Machine Intelligence

Hidden Figures I recently watched the movie “Hidden Figures”.  From all reports it was reasonably accurate (given some poetic license on the directors part). Apart from the obvious equal rights messages the scenes describing the implementation of the IBM machine portrayed much human drama that is relevant to today’s debates on AI. The character Dorothy Vaughn […]

This blog looks at what the current limitations of Artificial Intelligence with respect to Autonomy. What is Artificial intelligence Good at Now? Artificial Intelligence is good at some very specific things, like pricing a spare room in your house for Airbnb (see “The secret of airbnbs pricing algorithm”), sequencing your genome from a sample of

Whilst the Driverless Car is yet to own the roads there are many examples of the use of Artificial Intelligence in technology products dating back to as early as 1947 when a DC4 Aircraft was piloted by a punch card driven computer to accomplished the first entirely automatic flight across the Atlantic Ocean, flying from Newfoundland

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled The AI anxiety: our preoccupation with superintelligence references one of the most spectacularly dumb ideas about how an Artificial Intelligence could be a threat to humanity.  The scenario, envisaged by a philosopher at the Future of Humanity institute in Oxford, Nick Bostrum, is quoted below: “Bostrom’s favourite apocalyptic hypothetical involves

This blog looks at a current debate in the Artificial Intelligence research community that questions whether an Artificial Intelligence needs to mimic a human to be considered intelligent. Birds and Airplanes A common analogy used in the Artificial Intelligence community is the phenomena of flight. No one can deny that human engineered aircraft fly, but

This blog looks at how we can determine the smartness of an Artificial Intelligence by measuring its performance on real-world problems. How Well Does the Curve Fit the Data? If our curves do not fit the data well then our models do not explain reality and to have intelligence we need to be right at least most

This post will provide an over view of how AI works. Before you click away, this is neither as complicated nor mathematical as you might fear.  While having a sophisticated understanding of mathematics is needed to be able to prove that the algorithms used in AI actually do something useful the basic principles are really

  What is Artificial Intelligence? Last post I introduced my premise that we have not seen anything called Artificial Intelligence with real intelligence. We have just seen machines that can do sequences of simple calculations on large amounts of data very quickly and as a result perform tasks that have hitherto been the sole domain